The Soul of Barb's New Machine was creat 1169

And will crash on just about all 'modern' sites. No thanks.

Read carefully, I recommend this only once:

- Buy a small form-factor peecee that is advertised as low-noise. Shuttle brand is strongly recommended.

- Buy the fastest CPU you can budget and let it underclock as much as possible -- it will still run as the blazes. Currently, only AMD Athlon Sempron CPU's will run cooler when underclocked, but not the Intel Pentium 4's.

- Buy large, 'slow' hard disks and set them in silent mode. The Samsung and are very silent.

- Buy as much RAM as you can budget, and choose an OS that will use it fully as cache (ie not Microsoft products). Try to go for at least 1 gigabyte.

- A sane Unix is preferred, e.g. FreeBSD or NetBSD. Choose only a Linux distro if your admirers have the free time to hunt down all the patches and other crud to create a complete system. Let them install a dual-boot with Windwoes XP, if neccessary.

- Let them install a KL-10 emulator with TOPS-10.

The result is a very silent machine the size of a shoebox that consumes relatively little power, operates mostly out of RAM, is most of the time in power-saving mode, and is then still 5-10 times as fast as your old W95-pentium machine was and is at least 100 times less afwul. Finally it has vastly better quality components than a low-power VIA Eden board and unlike a VIA Eden, it can use more than 512 megabytei RAM.

Yes, but not with peecee crap; the electricity savings alone are worth to upgrade.

By the way, my New Years present was a Nintendo Gamecube (vintage 2001) that I hooked up to my SGI O2 (vintage 1999).

scs